Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World

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Author: Bill Clinton

Genre: Nonfiction

Rating: ***** (5 Stars)

Summary

Since leaving the White House in 2001, Bill Clinton has been involved with a number of charitable endeavors, many of which are profiled in Giving. He describes needs that exist, and the people and organizations that are working to meet them, all the while maintaining a positive, upbeat tone.

Everyone has different ways they can contribute. Some people are in a position to donate money while others share their time. Some organizations exist to pair “social entrepreneurs,” people who have good ideas but need funding, with people who want to donate money to a cause they can believe in. Clinton discusses all of these and more, organizing his book with chapters that focus on gifts of time, money, goods, skills, and gifts of “reconciliation and new beginnings.” He goes on to discuss “model gifts,” programs that have proven effective everywhere they have been tried, and can be “replicated with predictable positive results;” roles of government; and ways that markets and non-profits can be organized for greater benefit.

Most importantly, Clinton focuses on how individuals can make a difference by finding ways to give that fit their circumstances. He profiles schoolchildren who donate pennies or organize community cleanup days; pioneers of microcredit such as Muhammad Yunus; billionaires such as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet who have made huge donations of both money and time for improving education and healthcare, fighting poverty, and stopping the spread of AIDS and other serious diseases; and people like Oseola McCarty, a woman who worked all her life washing and ironing clothes, lived frugally, and at age eighty seven donated $150,000 to endow a scholarship fund for poor college students.

An appendix, “Resources,” tells where to find more information about the programs profiled.

Excerpts:

Because I grew up in a family without a lot of money, in a place where most families had to watch how they spent every penny, I’ve always respected people who found a way to give when it isn’t easy do. The most astonishing example of this kind of giving I ever saw occurred in 1995, when Oseola McCarty, an eighty-seven-year-old black woman from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, gave $150,000 to the University of Southern Mississippi to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students in financial need.

For more than seventy-five years, Oseola McCarty had eked out a living washing and ironing other people’s clothes. She dropped out of school in the sixth grade to take care of her sick, childless aunt and never returned. She never married. From 1947 on, she lived in a modest home her uncle gave her. She never owned a car and at eighty-seven still walked over a mile to the nearest grocery store to buy food, pushing her own shopping cart. All this time she was saving, and her savings were earning interest in the local bank. At the end of 1994, the arthritis in her hands forced her to give up washing and ironing. She met with her banker and decided that she wanted to give 60 percent of her savings to help deserving young people go to college, with the rest going to her church and relatives.

(Pages 25-6)

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Next door to my library in Little Rock, Arkansas, is the world headquarters of Heifer International, founded in 1944 by Dan West, who was a relief worker during the Spanish Civil War. That experience convinced him that what poor and suffering people really need far more than temporary help is the ability to support themselves. So he began shipping them cows.

Sixty-three years later, Heifer has evolved into one of the world’s most successful and widely acclaimed givers for two reasons. First, it works to end worldhunger by giving cows, goats, and other food and income-producing livestock and agricultural goods to poor families around the world. The animals are now bought locally to maximize resistance to local diseases and to help local economies. They produce milk, eggs, wool, and meat, enhancing nutrition and earning money for education, health care, better housing, and small-business endeavors. Heifer partners with local groups to ensure that the agriculture it supports is sustainable, promoting animal health, and water quality, soil conservation, and efficient energy use. Heifer also champions equality for women and community development.

The second reason for Heifer’s success is that those who receive its animals are required to share the first offspring with others in need, thus multiplying the impact of all donated animals and making their recipients partners in the struggle against hunger and poverty. Since 1944, Heifer has given animals to 10 million people, but through the ritual of “Passing on the Gift,” it has helped more than 45 million people in 128 countries around the world, with plans to reach 23 million more by the end of the decade.

(Pages 109-10)

My Thoughts

If you believe our news media and many of our politicians, our world is going to Hell in the proverbial handbasket. We hear a great deal about problems, such as wars, natural disasters, disease, and starvation, but very little in the way of solutions, or ways things are improving. One thing I really liked about Bill Clinton’s book is that he doesn’t dwell on the negatives. Instead of writing a book about problems, he has written a book about solutions, focusing on how even the smallest contribution, the widow’s mite, can make a difference if it is used wisely. Clinton doesn’t waste time on things that don’t work; instead, he focuses on programs with documented positive results. He balances his heartwarming success stories with statistics detailing exactly how a particular program has made a difference.

Giving took me from feeling overwhelmed and intimidated by the world’s problems to feeling empowered and capable of making of difference.

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